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Works that are making headlines

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Elvis Costello sang that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chips paper. For a recently opened exhibition at Raid Projects in the Brewery Arts Complex, it is also art. Featuring 40 works of disassembled, rearranged, painted and otherwise altered newspapers, “Art News” is a look into eight international artists’ repurposing of a ubiquitous commodity.

Since Picasso collaged a piece of the Parisian paper Le Journal into a Cubist painting nearly a century ago, newspapers have found their way into the work of various artists, from Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the ‘50s and ‘60s to Gillian Wearing and Martin Creed today, the latter two of whom have each won London’s Turner Prize for visual art and also contributed pieces to “Art News.”

Other contributors include Chinese artist Gordon Cheung, who used London’s Financial Times as a canvas for his painting, and British deconstructionist Kim Rugg, who meticulously cut up an entire front page of the New York Times, chopping each word into individual letters and rearranging them alphabetically. Australian artist Alex Hamilton developed an elaborate hieroglyphics system to transcribe and reinterpret a newspaper’s text.

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“Newspapers have been rediscovered by lots of artists because it can be political or just formal. A lot of people work anyway with sort of found objects and found images,” said “Art News” curator and contributing artist Hugh Mendes. “It’s quite traditional in a way. It’s also very immediately contemporary because they’re working with newspapers and the images that are there right now.”

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-- Susan Carpenter

“Art News,” Raid Projects, 602 Moulton Ave., L.A. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Mondays to Thursdays by appointment, through Sept. 24. Free. (323) 441-9593 or www.raidprojects.com.

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